by Wei Wei, Translator: David Ball
Clutching a photograph of his son, Michael boarded a flight from Shanghai to Beijing for a tough conversation. After dinner with his parents, he solemnly called a meeting and admitted to a secret he had been keeping for years: He was gay. Then out spilled another: They had a grandchild.
Despite having lived with his same-sex partner for eight years, Michael had never come out to his family. In 2013, after the couple was established at work and settled at home, they decided to have a child through surrogacy. For the first few months after their son was born, they made do with a nanny, but it soon became clear they were in over their heads. Finally, Michael, the child’s biological father, worked up the courage to have the talk with his parents — and ask them for help.
Immediately after breaking the news, Michael showed them a photo of their grandson. His parents were shocked and peppered him with questions like “Are you sure the child is really yours?” and “You’re not lying to us again, are you?” But as Michael recalls, his plan had a perk: Compared with the revelation that they had a grandkid, his parents didn’t have much time to worry about his sexual orientation. A week later, they moved down from Beijing to help.
If the main obstacle to LGBT acceptance in the United States or other Western countries is religious conservativism, LGBT Chinese face a different challenge. Conservative cultural expectations and patriarchal norms dictating children to carry on the family line have long been the main source of pressure on China’s gay community, including those living outside China’s borders. In an attempt to alleviate this pressure, many enter into potentially harmful “sham” marriages with heterosexuals. Others contract paper marriages with homosexuals of the opposite sex.
More than a third of the respondents in my study either had been in or were still in paper marriages — a number that doesn’t include sham marriages. Yet matrimony on its own isn’t enough. LGBT Chinese are still expected to produce children.
But while doing so may not completely alleviate the pressures on the parent-child relationship, these tensions often transform with the arrival of a grandchild. Read more via Sixth Tone